He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
---Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Monday, October 12, 2009

Update and Some Random

Debbie is back in Michigan; still nothing solid other than a solid "No" from Mickey. We've shifted everything out of the last room in the basement to be redone and I got a solid start on peeling the loose paper today before my fingers gave out. We should have that done tomorrow and the drywall repair work done. It will take two days to do the plastering, then several days for that to dry completely. We plan to be out of town for the weekend, so the timing should be just about right. When we get back, we should be able to prime and paint in the same day. Then we can finally shift everything into its final place and stop moving the same stuff over and over.

Over the weekend, we were able to clear the rest of the stuff out of the garage and into the basement. For the first time since we arrived, Debbie's mom can park in her garage again. That was starting to bug me a little, so I'm glad we could get that done while she's off visiting family in Connecticut. It's looking more and more likely that we'll be here for a bit, so we are trying to get out of the way as much as possible.

We seem to have some movement on the DSL front. We are supposed to receive a DSL modem tomorrow with instructions and the service should be turned on Wednesday or Thursday. I'll believe it when I'm surfing at something other than 40Kbps. I'm sure there will be a snag somewhere. And HP called to say they are sending a replacement video card for our PC. The new one should be here Thursday and none too soon. The cooling fan on our current video card is starting to sound more like a garbage disposal every day.

I bumped into a few things today while doing the usual back-and-forth with HP support. Harvard students are whining that they will no longer have free hot breakfast in their dorms. These are the future Masters of the Universe that will no doubt figure out a way to screw up even more badly than the current crop who nearly destroyed the world's economy: "Students generally feel that if you come to Harvard, for what you’re paying, you should probably have the right to a hot breakfast." I'll accept that as long as I have the "right" to pimp-slap whiny Harvard bastards.

And the BBC asks, "What happened to global warming?" Good question. Maybe we should invest all those 10's of millions spent on global conferences on actually understanding how the freaking climate works before we destroy the western economy trying to "fix" it. Every climate model predicted ever-higher temperatures. Not a single one even hinted at a decade-plus cooling period (which looks to continue; our temps have been 10-20 degrees F below average for a couple weeks now). Personally, I feel that's because politics and greed determined the results, the models were built to only spit out those results, and anyone who dared create a model that disagreed would find their funding suddenly disappearing. But I'm a suspicious sort. A less suspicious person would conclude that at this stage, spending money on reducing the uncertainties is a better way to go rather than spending money on "cures" that have about as much chance of making things worse as making things better. Geeks can read this to get an idea of how things ought to be proceeding. Won't happen, of course. Instead, the West will self-destruct and China will become dominant for the next couple centuries.

And a very insightful article on why it is nearly impossible for a legislator to actually know what they are voting for. Of course, that wasn't the intention of the author, but it is the only intelligent reading possible. It is also a good explanation of how congressional staffers on the payroll of major corporations and non-profits are able to sneak all sorts of crap into bills without any member of Congress being aware that it is in there. Then the lawyers and judges "interpret" the law in ways that defy all rational thought (ADA being a recent example). Whatever sort of health care "reform" happens, understand that large insurance carriers will benefit, large health care providers will benefit, large pharmaceutical companies will benefit. You will get screwed, hard and fast, all the while being told how it's all for your own good. There isn't much that is sure in this life, but that is a sure thing.

And on that pleasant note, I shall go to bed and fall into a deep, blissful sleep in the full and certain knowledge that my over-lords in Washington DC are looking out for my best interests.